Posts Tagged ‘San Francisco Giants’

It’s 8:44 ET as I type this. The Giants aren’t a good baseball team. They are unlikely to be a good team next year, either.

But it doesn’t matter on nights like tonight because Tim Lincecum is absolutely filthy, and he is embarrassing the Nationals through three innings. I don’t know if it will hold up for the entire game, but I’m pretty darn excited right now.

The Giants have control of this guy for at least 4 more years, and if they’re smart they’ll lock him up sooner rather than later. I want this guy on my pitching staff for a long, long time.

I was a little late for the start of Giants/Dodgers tonight. I turned on the TV (I love MLB Extra Innings, I will never go without again) anxious to see young Timmy facing the evil ones. Instead, I see Merkin Valdez striking out the side in the first.

What the hell is going on? Why isn’t Lincecum pitching? I don’t know whether to cry or start kicking things or both.

Update: Thankfully, not injury related. Oddly, the Giants decided to hold off on pitching Lincecum until after some forecasted rain went through the area. Even more odd, one inning after Lincecum finally got in the game it was delayed 74 minutes. Then Bochy let him keep pitching anyway!

Whatever. It worked. Lincecum came on in the 3rd and pitched 4 shutout innings of one-run ball and the Giants finally won. Weird

I can’t go through an entire season of major league baseball as depressed as watching and cheering only for the Giants would make me. I’m not renouncing my Giants fanhood by any stretch of the imagination. They are still “it”. But I can’t write about them on a regular basis and maintain my sanity.

The roster is a disgrace, and the manager is making it worse (Aaron Rowand hitting sixth!). Fantastic young pitching getting beaten down by a lineup that can’t score (if Matt Cain goes on a murderous rampage and half the locker room is left dead I would both understand and immediately forgive him).

This is a team that is supposedly built around defense and speed that doesn’t play defense well and doesn’t steal bases. It’s a joke.

So I’m going to follow and write about the Blue Jays, too. The most important aspect of this choice is that they are in the AL. They don’t play the Giants, so I don’t feel as slimy as I otherwise might as a sports polygamist.

They are close, too, obviously. I’ll be able to attend several games in Toronto this summer. I like the roster, it has some real young talent (Alex Rios, Dustin McGowan, Jesse Litsch) to go along with some well known veterans (Vernon Wells, Frank Thomas, Roy Halladay).

They’re unlikely to challenge the Red Sox and Yankees for AL East supremacy, but they aren’t so bad that it’s impossible, either.

Five years on the Giants, and during that time, I’ve been mostly critical of them, but at least there seemed to be some sense of competence and respect in the way they went about their business. I haven’t agreed with everything, but at least they appeared to be giving an honest effort. The way these last couple of year has gone, and the way they (Magowan and Sabean, in particular) have been acting, is, frankly, abhorrent to me. Most of you have noticed that all I ever write anymore is complaints and criticisms. Well, I’ve noticed, too.

This team makes me mad, disappointed, and most importantly, uninterested. I am not interested in being lied to. I am not interested in a team that has so little respect for its fans that they would think it’s OK to shit all over the greatest player in team history. I am not interested in an owner and general manager who think it’s OK to field a team of has-beens, misfits, and never-was, washed-up players; and then lie about it right to my face.

Yikes. Ladies and Gentlemen, you’re 2008 San Francisco Giants!

By the way, this team is now 8-20 in spring training. They played their own AAA Club, Fresno, yesterday… and lost. San Francisco is a baseball town, there is no doubt. But this team is going to start and finish terribly, and there is little in the way of young hitting talent to make anyone hopeful. That is enough to badly damage attendance anywhere. And 2009 isn’t going to be any better.

Brian Sabean is not going to last into next season as GM. He better not, anyway. Under his control, this team has not drafted and developed a single significant hitter through its own system. Not one! It’s embarrassing.

Barry Bonds covered up the many mistakes of the Sabean era for a long time. Now that he’s gone, it’s apparent to even the casual fan that this guy is a fraud.

That’s the best term I can use to describe the Giants’ farm system. And it’s why our opening day shortstop will be none other than Brian Bocock, a tiny 22-year old who hit .220 in A-ball last season (the highest level he’s played at) and is hitting .182 this spring.

Ray Durham isn’t playing the field in spring training games due to a shoulder problem

Rich Aurilia’s hamstrings are keeping him from playing

And it doesn’t make me feel the least bit guilty that all three of these injures made me happy. This team is going to be bad, and what is the point of trotting these guys out there every day when the limited amount of young talent we do have could be playing instead? I can accept Vizquel for his defense (the young pitchers need him), but that’s it. I don’t care what you’re paying the other two, I don’t want to watch them.

And that’s the biggest problem with having them out there — hopelessness. They’re bad, and they aren’t going to be helpful in the future. Get them out of there.

Since thinking about the San Francisco Giants gives me a migraine, I’m going to continue to focus on the Eagles even though they don’t play a meaningful game for another seven months. OK? OK.

We’ll finally get some action to supplant all the speculation of the last month as free agency begins tonight. Don’t be surprised if one or two players sign in the first couple of hours — somehow hashing out a deal with their new team in such a brief period (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).

As to the Eagles, I doubt you’ll see much from them in the first couple of days. They like to let the landscape unfold before they start writing checks.

(P.S. — This morning Buster Olney declared the Giants as his candidate for worst team in the majors — despite having a “top 10 pitching staff”. That’s how awful this lineup is.)

In what is just an interesting footnote of recent baseball history, the Devil Rays had a deal worked out with Tim Lincecum in the 2006 draft.

We had Evan Longoria first on our board. We had one other pitcher…We thought Longoria was going to go two to Colorado, and we had cut a deal with Tim Lincecum, to take three. Colorado didn’t take Longoria two. We found out at like 2:30 in the morning, the night before and we ended up taking Longoria, and we are ecstatic with how that turned out.

Not as ecstatic as the Giants are, my friend. The Rays got Longoria, who should get a call-up this season at some point, and Lincecum fell all the way to San Francisco at the #10 spot. The rest of the first round is littered with players who are still deep in developmental stages, of course.

The Rockies ended up taking Greg Reynolds at #2, who is attending their spring training as a non-roster invitee.

I love the start of baseball season — the promise of a fresh start, the roster decisions, the young guys who light up spring training, fantasy drafts — it’s all part of what makes baseball so great.

But my happiness is tempered a bit this season because of one inescapable truth — the San Francisco Giants are going to suck. And they are going to suck bad.

The lineup is pathetic, the bullpen is questionable, and there isn’t a lot in the way of young talent outside of the pitching staff. Still, there are some things worth paying attention to over the next month and a half:

Is Kevin Frandsen the answer at third? Exactly how much did he “bulk up”? Is Sabean really interested in Joe Crede?

Can Ortmeier provide any power at first base?

Will Sabean find someone to take Dave Roberts?

Who performs the best out of Schierholtz, Davis, and Lewis? Who gets sent down when the season begins?

What, if any, changes have Cain and Lincecum made in the off-season?

Will Zito rebound?

All of these questions will be answered in the context of the Giants being a terrible team, but at least there’s something interesting to focus on. I’ll also be making my first trip to San Francisco this summer and I couldn’t be any more excited about that.